Tag Archives: Box 3

Box 3, Spool 5 has some commentary up in response to my own take on Avatar, emphasizing the contradictory nature of a big-budget Hollywood film and its proposed criticism of Capitalism. First though I want to address his thought that not all of the message is found in the medium (which leads to his larger point):

The technical feats Kvond explains are interesting, but only in the sense that here the most ‘natural’ is reached by way of the most artificial, an irony which mirrors deep ecology’s unavowed projections onto nature. It is on one level impressive what the capitalist spectacle can do with (or perhaps as) technology, though the film’s implicit reflections on subjectivity are to me less intriguing than the political message the film tries to convey; not all message is medium.

Just to be clear as to the reading I was making of Avatar, it is not strictly that the medium is the message so much as the modes of communication enact the very relationships (and values) that the film was attempting to forward in a very specific fashion. This is to say, there is, or can be, an enactment of avatarship in the very experience of watching a film on Avatar ethics, really almost a Brechtian involution. One need only take your glasses off for a minute during the film to realize the differences brought to bear. That this is accomplished through a new severing of affect from space, and then its restitching, yes, this is a powerful metaphor or even mode of analysis for society and personhood, but the medium is not the message to the degree that the message is dis-associated from the medium in a manner that leaves Box 3, Spool 5s point untouched.

If one is looking for performative contradictions that disqualify the ideologically critical position Cameron takes, one might ask as well whether Box 3s own participative purchase of 3D glasses and expensive movie, and her/his use of the commercially simulative blogged medium also disqualifies a critical engagement with the all-encompassing thread of Capitalist relations (the octopus arms are everywhere!). I rather take a different position. Capitalism is not “the enemy”, huge spectacle productions are not simply or reductively pacifications. The location of critical change does not really come outside of relations, but is immanent within them. Oppositional thinking is often weak and relatively impoverished, fueled by counterproductive angers, fears and projections. The idea that “Copenhagen debating hall” was something more than Avatar the movie, more than a spectacle of specific device…yes, from where are our freedoms to spring? In a certain regard I find “hegemony” boring. That is not because I don’t believe that hegemonies exists, but rather that I believe that questions of hegemony are more complex than is often appreciated. It just is too easy a word. The importation of hegemonic values is always integral to the exaption of those human forms for new and different uses, and the concept of radical break is, frankly, over-rated.

If there was a “radical break” in Cameron’s message, it was the innovation of new aesthetic experiences of some very old themes, it was the affective way that the (political) consciousness of the viewer was regrafted onto her or his very skin, engaging the verities of space itself. It was Kantian from the inside out, where the categories become twisted and externalized through performative construction. Does this mean that Real 3D is inherently liberal, or even ecological? No, though I have argued that there are suspensions that were accomplished in that film that do have strong ecological content or possibility. It may very well be that this is because Real 3D, as we in a historically contingent fashion experience it, is metaphysical. And from that displacement into metaphysics, an ecology of persons and planet can be argued. And because aesthetically expressed, felt.

Ode to Man

Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.

Ode to Man

A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?

Ode to Man

But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.